Banks and FinTechs are unbundling the cross-border stack to win over CFOs by shifting the focus from issuing new assets to ensuring different forms of money can actually talk to each other. The digital-money race has moved beyond simple token creation to a complex test of interoperability, where projects like BLOOM, Project Agorá, Project Pangea, Qivalis and UniKA are testing how stablecoins, tokenized deposits and central bank money move across institutions and borders. Visa joined the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s BLOOM initiative on Tuesday, adding a global payments heavyweight to an experiment designed to connect traditional payment systems with stablecoin-based settlement rails. Participants already include DBS, OCBC, UOB, Partior, Circle and Stripe, with plans to test settlement using regulated dollar- and euro-denominated stablecoins, potentially allowing institutions to settle seven days a week rather than adhering to the standard banking calendar. [1]
On the same day, OpenPayd integrated its universal financial infrastructure with Circle Payments Network (CPN), enabling businesses to make near-instant cross-border fiat payments. Elsewhere, Project Agorá is testing tokenized commercial bank deposits against tokenized central bank reserves across currencies, while Project Pangea explores real-time stablecoin-based FX settlement between Europe and Korea. Qivalis now brings together 37 European banks behind a regulated euro stablecoin, and Korea’s UniKA is organizing banks on the other side of that corridor. For corporate treasurers, the pilot phase is not the interesting part.
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The real focus is whether the networks carrying these new forms of money will actually talk to one another. A multinational corporation does not ultimately care whether the technology underneath a $20 million supplier payment is intellectually elegant. It cares whether value can move from the company’s bank in New York to a supplier’s account in Seoul at the right time, in the right currency, with final settlement, regulatory certainty, sufficient liquidity and usable transaction information. That requires more than issuing a token. It requires conversion, FX, compliance, liquidity, settlement and connectivity.
Visa’s arrival to the BLOOM project pushes the question one step further: what happens when a global network built around conventional payments becomes a bridge into tokenized settlement rather than being replaced by it? The emerging setting suggests that functions bundled together inside correspondent banking may begin separating into distinct competitive layers. In an operational sense, the cross-border payment may become less a product itself than an orchestrated sequence of financial services. This has implications for banks because, in today’s model, the institution holding the corporate relationship often controls much of the journey. In an interoperable environment, the institution holding the deposit does not necessarily have to own the FX, routing or settlement layer.
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The commercial value for multinational treasury emerges when digital euros can become digital dollars without recreating the same FX, liquidity and settlement frictions that exist in correspondent banking today. Biswarup Chatterjee, global head of partnerships and innovation, Citi Services at Citi, told PYMNTS in a December interview that blockchain is not replacing traditional financial infrastructure, but rather being folded into it.
“What really excited us is the fact that we are able to integrate [blockchain] into our operating model … create a 24/7, always-on, on-demand ecosystem for our clients,” Chatterjee said. “But the key word is integration.”
